Wednesday, September 23, 2015

According to a recent
survey by the NGO Paz Activa about
organized crime, 19.7% of Venezuelans believe the official version by the
government that paramilitaries are to blame for the country’s organized crime. Almost
the same percentage of those surveyed (18.9%) blamed guerillas.

Saturday, September 12, 2015

TeleSUR is the Venezuela
government’s answer to what it considers a biased and imperialist centered
international media landscape. It regularly republishes conspiracy theories
about Venezuelan politics published originally by the Agencia Venezolana de Noticias.

However, being TeleSUR
a global news outlet, it also gives space to international conspiracy theories.
Here
is a long article published in the TeleSur web page summarizing the most famous
conspiracy theories around the 9/11 events of 2001. The theory favored by the
author of the piece is that the events were an inside job by the Bush administration
in order to start wars and get a lot of oil. A very similar
piece was published by TeleSUR last year September.

The channel’s conspiracy
theorist in residence, Miguel Pérez Pirela, known in Venezuela for claiming in
2012 that the opposition was sending encrypted subversive messages via
newspaper crossword puzzles (here and here), has this video
clip produced by TeleSur explaining what really happened in 9/11.

Thursday, September 3, 2015

The article “Characterizing
paramilitarism” by PSUV leader Freddy Bernal, published in Aporrea.org, is
a good example of a typical rhetorical devise used in conspiracy theories: the
conspiracy theory is true because we repeatedly said it is true and because we relatedly
warned of the consequences of the conspiracy.

It matters little if
the events can also be explained as the consequence of many other causes, for
example: government incompetence. Such explanations will be dismissed as being
also part of the conspiracy, part of a “smoke screen” or “media campaign” to
cover up the conspiracy and blame the government.

According to Bernal, “the
facts, and the actions of the security forces, are gradually proving the
importation of the paramilitary culture in our country. This is a grim [nefasto] phenomenon about which we have warned
time and again, pointing to the relation this plague [paramilitarism] has with
a sector of the Venezuelan right-wing. The repeated denunciations made by the bolivarians about the issue have been disqualified
by the opposition with the argument that they are but a ‘smoke screen’ to cover
security deficiencies.”

The important
premises of Bernal’s argument are: that the actions of the government are evidence of the truth of its own
conspiracy theories, that the links between paramilitaries and the “right-wing”
exit because the government has repeated often that they exist, and that there
is no such a thing as “security deficiencies” in Venezuela.

Follows Bernal´s own
explanation of recent events: “I believe that in Venezuela the right-wing,
having been defeated several times in their traditional conspiratorial formulas
(military coups, magnicidio, street insurrections,
foreign interventions, etc.), has opted for plans to launch paramilitarism in
order to overthrow the Venezuelan government. (…) The capture of the, no longer
supposed but confessed, murderers of Liana Hergueta is evidence without any
doubt of a diabolical cocktail made of opposition parties + paramilitarism + trafficking
of dollars + guarimbas [street
protests] + crime. The story told by the murderers confirms the denunciations
we, the bolivarians, have been making…”